"A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.""A play is a passion.""I think enthusiasm is the answer to passionate writing.""If you're going to make a musical, don't cartoon it from the play. Make it better than the play. Have a reason for making it sing.""In no instance is there to be a musical or opera of Inherit the Wind because it doesn't sing. It's an intellectual play.""It's always such a joy that you wake up in the morning and there's work to do.""Our only competition in the theater is boredom, because if I'm bored with a play, if I'm revolted by a play on stage, with the Broadway prices, especially today, I'm going to walk out and not come back and pay that price again.""The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control.""The man who has everything figured out is probably a fool.""The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.""You must not demand the failure of your peers, because the more good things that are around in film, in television, in theater - why the better it is for all of us."
Lawrence was born Jerome Lawrence Schwartz in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Sarah (née Rogen), a poet, and Samuel Schwartz, a printer. He worked for several small newspapers as a reporter/editor before moving into radio as a writer for CBS. With his writing partner, Robert E. Lee, Lawrence worked for Armed Forces Radio during World War II; Lawrence and Lee became the most prolific writing partnership in radio, with such long-running series as Favorite Story among others.
Lawrence and Lee turned to the live theatre in 1955 with Inherit the Wind, which remains among the most-produced plays in the American theatre. They also collaborated on the plays Auntie Mame, The Incomparable Max, and First Monday in October, among others. In 1965, they founded the American Playwrights' Theatre, a plan to bypass the commerciality of the Broadway stage, which foreshadowed the professional regional theatre movement. Their wildly successful play, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, was produced through the American Playwrights Theatre, and premiered at Lawrence's alma mater, Ohio State University, which also commissioned their play on the life and times of James Thurber, Jabberwock (1972).
In all, they collaborated on 39 works, including a 1956 musical adaptation of James Hilton's Lost Horizon, entitled Shangri-La, with the author himself. They also adapted Auntie Mame into the hit musical Mame with composer Jerry Herman, which won a Tony Award for its star, Angela Lansbury. Less successful was the Lawrence and Lee collaboration with Herman, also starring Lansbury, Dear World, a musical adaptation of Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot.
Several of Lawrence and Lee's plays draw on events from United States history to speak to contemporary issues. Inherit the Wind (1955) addressed intellectual freedom and McCarthyism by speaking of a fictionalize Scopes Monkey Trial. The Gang's All Here (1959) examined government corruption in the 1920s. The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (1970) was a Vietnam-era exploration of Thoreau's resistance to an earlier war.
Lawrence taught playwriting in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
Lawrence's lone Tony Award nomination was for Best Book of a Musical for Mame. He died due to complications from a stroke in Malibu, California.
The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, a research facility and archive was dedicated in Lawrence and Lee's honor at the Ohio State University in 1986.
